How good is snooker?
October 4th, 2006
My latest obsession is one which will stay with me forever I think. Snooker is awesome would be an understatement. I have played the game a few times in the past but only now have I got all the technical details clear and am aware of the finer rules. A few practical and online games (which also helped understand rules and see how to strategise when you don’t foul every second ball like you do in real life) later, I feel much more confident that I wont lose by 100 points every second game I play.
A bit on the origin of the game from Wikipedia:
The game of billiards dates back to the 15th century but snooker is a more recent invention. In the late 19th century billiards games were popular among British army officers stationed in India, and players used to experiment with variations on the game. Due to the fact that billiards was a two-player game, multi-player variations such as life pool (where different coloured balls were used as cue and/or object balls, depending on the situation or number of players) and pyramid pool (fifteen red balls racked in a triangle where each player received a point per ball potted) became popular. Black pool was a form of pyramid pool that took the black ball from a life pool set so a player could pot a red then the black for more points. The most commonly accepted story is that, at the officers’ mess in Jabalpur some time in 1875, a Colonel Sir Neville Francis Fitzgerald Chamberlain suggested adding coloured balls to black pool so that the variation featured fifteen reds, a yellow, green, pink and black (blue and brown were added some years later).
Snooker is the second most popular game in the UK, behind only to football. It is a game which is made for the television because of the drama, the come back possibility and the surprises which crop up in games. My friends from Britain still speak of one particular game which reached crazy audience numbers. Wikipedia says this about it:
Perhaps the peak of this golden age was the World Championship of 1985, when 18.5 million people (around one third of the population of the UK) watching BBC2 saw Dennis Taylor emerge victorious against Davis after a mammoth struggle. Play had started with the first session on Saturday afternoon, finishing with the potting of the last possible ball (with the exception of a re-spotted black) at 00:20 on Monday morning at the end of a gruelling final Sunday night session. To this day, polls rank the 1985 World Snooker Championship final amongst British television’s most memorable all-time moments.
What I like best about Snooker is that skill is not the key which will guarantee you victory. It is merely a pre-requisite. You need much more beyond skill. You need to use a lot of your mind, foresight to see what your opponents will do and plan ahead. One short sighted shot can mean that your opponent can get a big break and your chances to win the match have gone away. Another apsect I love - the two innings of snooker like the two innings in test cricket. After the red balls have been putted, the coloured balls still remain. So you can still cut a lead by as much as 27 points by potting six balls even if you have had a bad first half of a game.
As you keep playing snooker, you keep learning and you relish discovering the greater depths which exist in the game. In that, it is similar to real tennis. People who still play real tennis keep discovering aspects about the game and the players reach their best at a much later age compared to modern day games as the aspects to learn are simply so many.
Pool is much more popular in various parts of the world but I find snooker much more appealing and having many more tactical nuances to it. That it is my favourite cue sport is a given!
Tags: Snooker.
